The Life Unwired

with Ben Combee

I've got a few quick recommendations for anyone with a MP3 player and some time to listen to fascinating things.

The first recommendation is a two-part talk that Steve Wozniak delivered about how he got started in computers, going from his childhood through the founding of Apple. He talked a lot about the pranks he pulled and how having limited resources really helped him find creative designs. It's really funny and very inspiring. Part One / Part Two

Another good program is Dave Slusher's interview with science fiction writer James Patrick Kelly. This piece has some nice commentary about the early days of cyberpunk fiction including Kelly's take on Bruce Sterling, an interesting analysis of Kelly's story "Think Like a Dinosaur", and details on how he got started as a SF writer. Link

I've also started listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast, but I'm not quite recommending it just yet. Podcasting is a new term to the web world; it describes a method of recording audio programs, publicizing them through RSS feeds, distributing them using BitTorrent, and performing them using portable audio players. It's a neat application of these new technologies, and it's enabling the distribution of interesting talk to an audience that wants to hear other people talk about interesting things. Adam Curry (yes, the early 80's MTV VJ) was one of the first to put all of this together, and he's been doing a daily program for a few months now. Like a lot of early blogs, the program is more about itself than anything important; lots of the content is Adam and his listeners commenting about podcasting, mixed with some interesting music that's under free use licenses. I'm glad to see this all in development, but I want to see some technological improvements before this will go huge... that's a different essay :)